Today is a TechPresentations day - I published two presentations about Google infrastructure systems (an overview and BigTable) and one about Ubuntu Linix by its founder, Mark Shuttleworth who sold Thawte to Verisign and became second space tourist (I thought he was first).

I fixed annoying bug in XML::RSS::LibXML which rendered multiple tags as one tag with value of ARRAY(…).

It was most often seen when multiple categories were assigned to feed item but affected all duplicate tags (I fixed similar problem specifically with enclosures earlier).

Hope that will not break feeds any more.

Just a note: I didn’t see any records in access logs on old server for a while and disabled all fetching on old servers as well as web site instances.
It should not affect anybody except those site owners who’s feeds fetcher was double-crawling - now it’ll only do it once.

Let me know if you’ll have any problems getting your feeds.

As many of you noticed, there were several registration-related bugs. I fixed most of them yesterday/today but if you still have troubles registering or logging in, let me know and ‘ll try to fix them ASAP.

I’m really sorry that users were trying to register but failed to complete the process and went away. To remedy the problem at least partially, I created a page to resend an email with confirmation code (which didn’t reach some people and they are stuck in the middle of the process). I also added some links back and forth to make it harder to get lost during registration process, hope that helps.

I also fixed strange bug (a product of trash-OOP conversion process) with feed fetching failure when you just added it - please let me know if it’ll happen again.

I moved Feed Friends (and Feed Preprocessor) to new faster server. It was planned for a while and I was setting server up but today I finally moved it.

I updated DNS and I hope you will not see any glitches but in case you are still directed to old servers, you’ll have Access Denied error page - it means your DNS servers still cache old IPs.

Feeds will be updated on both old and new servers for a while to avoid problems with feed readers freaking out. There might be some unusual bugs though if you share your item or adding new feed already using new server but your feed reader still goes to old one (especially if you’re using some web-based feed reader) - reader will not get updated feed as you might expect.
Also i planned to put magic “beta” mark next to the title for a while and now it’s a good time. Once I moved whole thing to new server I hope to proceed with fixing bugs and adding new features.

Please let me know if you’ll find some problems with new server - best way is by adding comments to this post.

Thank you for your patience!

It might sound strange but I’m not only doing computer stuff (although it takes most of my life) - today I published my first instructable - Party top-hat made of playing cards.

I’ve been collecting playing cards for a long time and being interested in DIY (being subscribed to MAKE Magazine was probably my biggest acheivement so far), I thought it’ll be a great project because playing cards are also a great material (no, I don’t use collectable cards).

Take a look - I also did it as an experiment trying writing manuals/educational stuff (all of us have weak areas they have to work on).

Apparently some links got broken because I used pipes (”|” symbol) to separate fields, it also refused to accept lattitude and longtitude if zoom and type were missing (because of a broken link). Both problems are fixed now, it’ll also override links once it loads.

Also, Jeremy Zawodny didn’t like AdSense banners and he’s right - they were not related to content at all making them just some ads which is not cool ;) so I removed them until I’ll need really big money to pay for hosting.

Update: I also moved map type selectors into maps to use native interface. I hope to move zoom selectors there too.

Google maps vs. Yahoo! maps tool got some links in blogs starting with the review of Flickr geotagging by Thomas Hawk (who also posted a link in TechCrunch story comments).
Looks like people liked it because it also made it’s way to Mashup of the day on Programmable Web.

After all the development (and not as much testing ;)), I desided to open up preprocessing configuration tool.

This part of the interface allows you to control how feed items get processed for you and there are currently 6 modification modules:

• Link from description (regex) - useful when feed owner is putting a link to some intermediate page but feed item always containg destination link.
• Remove part of the descriptio (regex) - useful when blog owner annoys you with some content that is not really useful.
• Feed Friends toolbar - all links get wrapped into a frame with “share” button on it so you can easily share the item with Feed Friends. Uses my first CPAN module - HTML::LinkChanger (Enabled by default).
• Header and Footer - simple modules adding arbitrary HTML on top and at the bottom of the items just in case you want to write something over there.
• In-feed Controls - module, I was writing about some time ago which adds links to popular services that can do something with item link/title like del.icio.us, Digg and Feed Friends of course. (Enabled by default)

There are also a couple of modules that filter out some news items by Title or Description regex in case you don’t want to see all of the news in the feed.

Feel free to change some configurations, e.g. add/remove some In-feed controls - you’ll see the results next time your feeds will get updated, fetched and preprocessed. You can also disable a module by clicking “Disable” next to enabled module as well as revert configuration to global defaults, if you changed it, by clicking “Reset”.
P.S. This is essentialy a core of Feed Preprocessor and I’m open to suggestions for more preprocessing modules which will be much easier to add.

P.P.S. Please keep in mind that Feed Preprocessor only affects feeds that you added to a feed list and reading by you feed reader - it preserves original items intact when you share them.

P.P.P.S. Load and other issues might force me to remove some of the modules in the future. Let’s consider it BETA.

ROBOT

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Artist: Chernyshev family productions

Duration: 00:00:05

Created: Sun, 06 Aug 2006

Location: NJ, USA

Category: Cartoon

License: All rights reserved

Director: Alex Chernyshev

Producer: Nickolas Chernyshev

Actor: Robot

Tags: video cartoon